POSITIVE THINKING FOR A MODERN DAY PLAGUE

It has been a crisp, beautiful, blue autumn day here in my corner of Patagonia. Sun dapples the ground through the spreading branches of the four century-old beeches in the yard. I can hear the hollow chopping sound and strange chortling of a couple of the large and stunning Patagonian woodpeckers that grace us from time to time with their presence. And the squawk of the colorful and flamboyant burrowing parrots that usually live in rocky hollows up high in the mountains but that flock out of the heights in bands of twenty or so at this time of the year to descend on the apple trees that grow wild everywhere in these parts. The festive green, blue, yellow and red birds come to gorge themselves on the almost past-ripe fruit.

I can hear one neighbor’s lawn mower somewhere in the distance, hammer blows on the deck that my closest neighbor is building in fits and starts, as time allows, and the occasional whine of a chainsaw from my friend Daniel’s house down by the lagoon, where he’s preparing firewood for the winter. There was a light breeze a while ago, but now everything is doldrums-still. Virginia is out sitting in a lawn chair in the late-afternoon autumnal sunlight, wearing cap and sweater and reading Dickens from her Kindle as our four dogs sunbathe nearby.

It is a warm, bucolic scene that belies what is going on in most of the rest of the world. The seventy-odd acres of forest beyond the yard—so inserted into the woodland are we that we’ve never figured out whether to call that the front yard or the backyard—stand immutable, a natural barrier to the outside world, and the solitude of which, as their warden for the past quarter-century, I have jealously guarded.

The peace and tranquility here are an invaluable treasure. And if it weren’t for having to go out occasionally for supplies, you could, perhaps, live perfectly well without ever learning that a modern-day plague has made the world grind to a halt, or that there is literally rampant panic and economic chaos in practically every country on earth—nowhere more than in my own native United States where the virus is literally testing and even belying the chimera of the American dream.

It would have been even easier to indulge in abstraction when we first arrived here all those many years ago. Back then, communications were scant. When we first started living here, we made do with a service that provided walkie-talkies with a telephone patch. “The Privileged Phoned” among our acquaintances had to grow accustomed to waiting for us to say “over” before they spoke. Then we had a land line. The phone company had to put in sixty-six telephone poles and a multi-par line to get it to us. And as soon as cellphones arrived in Patagonia, I was one of the first to have one, a cumbersome apparatus as large and hefty as a small paving brick. I was also one of the first to have dial-up Internet and to use it to make a living from home.

But before those later stages of “progress”, it wouldn’t have been hard to remain oblivious to anything but the raw nature surrounding us. Especially since, back then, there were only seven neighbors in hundreds of acres, and all of them nearly as skittish as we were. For us, the “news” could easily have been the changing of the seasons, the coming of long days of continuous heavy rain or extended drought, thirty- or forty-mile-an-hour wind gusts, the occasional blizzard, or the much more occasional eruption of one of the nearby volcanoes that dusted us with grey ash. With the exception of one family of autochthonous born-and-bread locals, of which Daniel forms part, we had all at some time survived the stress of busy careers in the city and had come here in search of solace.

But my career had been in big-city and international journalism and I quickly realized that I was a news junky who couldn’t get along without remaining permanently updated on what was going on in the rest of the world. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake the news monkey on my back. I had the constant nervous sensation that I was missing out on something crucial. So I quickly became an avid researcher and interpreter of the international news sources that swiftly populated, then overpopulated, the World Wide Web.

I have been thinking a great deal about all of this in the days since the corona virus left China on a world tour, infecting hundreds of millions and killing tens of thousands along the way. As a communications professional with forty years of history in the craft, I get that it is important for all of us to have full and accurate knowledge of the extent to which this disease is capable of affecting our lives and of what we must do to avoid the contagion and to prevent its spread as much as humanly possible. But once we are proactively doing all of those things, what more can we ask of ourselves?

Metro police check authorizations to circulate in Buenos Aires

Here in Argentina, where I live, the current president, Alberto Fernández, took swift and decisive measures to curtail or restrict the spread of the virus. He closed the country’s borders with neighboring nations, grounded international and all non-essential domestic flights, imposed a fourteen-day quarantine on all Argentines returning to the country from other nations, decreed the immediate closure of all schools, ordered bars and restaurants shuttered and took steps to close all non-essential businesses—pretty much everything but food suppliers and pharmacies. And those remaining open are subject to strict social-distancing norms to protect both consumers and employees.

President Fernández also imposed strict shelter in place orders on the country’s entire population to halt all non-essential human circulation. For common citizens this means only absolutely necessary trips to the grocery or drugstore. Essential public and private personnel, meanwhile, can circulate only as much as necessary to commute to and from work and to discharge their functions, but they must be in possession of authorization letters or credentials from their employers. To put teeth into these emergency measures, the Argentine president set fines of up to a hundred thousand pesos—about one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars—and worked with federal justice to implement already existing national emergency legislation imposing jail time for anyone violating the terms of the nationwide quarantine, ranging from fifteen days to fifteen years (depending on the seriousness of the violation).

Here in Patagonia, normally bustling
tourist towns are also deserted.

To date there have been several thousand people detained nationwide, but up to now, all of them have been fined and/or given house arrest under their own recognizance. However, the infraction goes on their record, with the idea being that any further violations of the quarantine would result in much harsher fines or sentences.

These measures seem to be working well to drastically reduce circulation. For instance, my sister-in-law requires twenty-four/seven home care and has a wonderful team of care-givers for that purpose, headed up by a male nurse friend of ours and his sister. My sister-in-law’s apartment building is on Cabildo, one of the busiest avenues in Buenos Aires—a capital city of three million people, with an urban sprawl surrounding it that is home to another fifteen million souls. On any given day of the week, Avenida Cabildo is a veritable sea of bustling, noisy humanity, and is jammed with buses, taxis, trucks and private automobiles. To add to the movement, one of the city’s busiest subway lines runs under it, with a surface entrance to a station on that line roughly every four blocks.

Avenida Cabildo at "rush hour".

But the other day, our friend had to go out at what is usually rush hour to buy some medication for his patient. What he saw was so strange and disconcerting that he snapped a photo with his cellphone showing that main commercial avenue virtually empty with only a handful of essential workers like himself out to make a crucial purchase or to wait for the sparse public transport.

His sister, who replaces him on his days off as my sister-in-law’s main care-giver, has a two-hour commute by train, which she takes at the main south-bound terminal, Constitución. She has started wearing a uniform and we’ve had to issue her with a care-giver authorization since she was stopped twice by Metropolitan Police officers on a single night as she was heading for Constitución to go home.

Images from downtown Buenos Aires shot over the days since the quarantine began in the early days of March are even more eerie. One shows an aerial shot of the principal entrance to the city proper from Buenos Aires Province completely deserted. Another picture is the iconic Obelisk at the heart of the city on the broad and usually traffic-bound Avenida Nueve de Julio. It is Twilight-Zone empty, as if a neutron bomb had vaporized all traces of humankind and left the buildings and Obelisk untouched.

One of the main accesses to downtown Buenos Aires

I can’t help but think that the decision to take such early, strict and severe action here is a reflection of the results of Italy’s delay in doing so. More than sixty percent of Argentina’s population is of Italian descent. Many families still have relatives and close ties to Italy. The tragic outcome of the pandemic there couldn’t help but hit home. And in general, people around the country have so far demonstrated an admirable level of solidarity and compliance, as well as bringing withering peer pressure on anyone who doesn’t obey, including reporting quarantine violators to the authorities.   

American friends have been a little shocked at the severity of these actions when I’ve mentioned them, but news from the US this morning was headlined by the decision of Maryland’s governor to impose similarly tough measures after witnessing the exponential advance of the virus in New York and New Jersey. Only time will tell how Argentina will weather this storm in the end, and indeed, known cases have doubled in the past week. But they remain relatively low for now, at just under a thousand infected, with two dozen fatalities to date out of a population of forty-four million.

The Obelisk...Twilight Zone-deserted

  

During a siesta the other day, I dreamed that I was part of a White House team working directly with the president. This president. The Don. My specific job was to do what I know how to do best. General research. Gather all available information on the virus to date. But another part of the job was to create executive summaries on the subject so hard-hitting and devastatingly convincing as to spur the president and his policy team to take every drastic measure suggested by current science, so as to not only halt the spread of the disease, but also to fully and adequately respond to it for as long as it posed a threat.

The president was at a long table surrounded by advisors. They were all sitting. I was standing before them with a sheaf of papers in my hands. All of them looked confident and professional in their dark suits, bright white shirts and silk neckties. For my part, I was the only one dressed in the same everyday attire that I wear to sit at my desk at home and write—faded jeans, a well-worn work shirt and a hoody. I felt entirely unequal to my task and doomed to failure.  

It would be wonderful at dire times like these if we all had vast medical research knowledge to help contribute to finding a vaccine and a cure. But we don’t. The best we can do is everything in our power to get out of the way, and to not complicate any further the lives of front-line professionals—doctors, nurses, technicians and first responders—who are working so hard and sacrificing so much to save as many of us as possible.

But once that’s done, I’m thinking, maybe I should go back to seizing the opportunity offered by the welcome isolation I found when I first arrived in this relatively remote area of the world. Maybe I need to tune out all of the “noise” extraneous to the basic knowledge of the virus that I require to keep myself, my neighbors and my loved ones safe. In short, to actively seek abstraction and to try to accept and enjoy being out of play for awhile. Perhaps each of us individually needs to embrace that sort of voluntary isolation-mentality for the time being. As if we were “on assignment” in Antarctica, or enjoying a period of rest, meditation and introspective reflection in some remote temple.

Maybe what we need, in order to help quell our worry and anxiety, which are futile and of no practical help in pulling us through—on the contrary, they undermine our inner strength and wellness—is to replace them with the sure knowledge that this crisis, like others we’ve survived in our lifetime, will eventually pass. That our task is not just to survive it, but to do so with the most positive attitude and heightened energy possible, so as to start rebuilding our worlds the minute the all-clear sirens sound. And that those of us fortunate enough to still have a roof over our heads and food on our tables are not “captives in our houses”, but safe and sound in our homes, for which we should be eternally grateful.

Anything else, for the moment, is simply beyond our control.